Archive for July 2006

It’s a terrible pity that it took a second Israeli massacre of civilians in the Lebanese town of Qana, one decade after the first one, to make the point that Israel shouldn’t be engaged in its ongoing, stupid, and terribly counterproductive war in Lebanon.

Never mind the mind-numbing list of atrocities minor and major that have been and doubtless will be committed. I think of the situation as requiring the application of political science’s variant upon Gödel’s incompleteness theorem: A country or other entity deeply implicated in a conflict is incapable of favouring a settlement that won’t seriously disadvantage others’ legitimate interests. In this particular case, Israel’s existential fears have combined with the country’s lack of empathy for even for Arabs who hold Israeli citizenship (Susan Nathan’s The Other Side of Israel is a good primer) to produce death and massacre for the other side. (Israeli civilians killed by Hezbollah, it should be noted, are outnumbered by Lebanese killed by the IDF by a factor of twenty.)

External intervention, by parties not excessively indebted to the ideological prejudices and bigotries of Israel and Hezbollah, is urgently needed. Will this materialize? Not before still more death. If it took three years to intervene in the siege of Sarajevo …

I caught Superman Returns Wednesday night with the boyfriend down at the Paramount, catching the film in IMAX 3-D. This medium was a good medium indeed for a superhero film, though one of the scenes requiring 3-D was superfluous. The acting was competent, the plot was interesting, and though hearing the Superman theme song play while the names of Kevin Spacey and Parker Posey appeared produced a small bit of cognitive dissonance I managed to move past it. Taken on its own terms, I’d have to say that the film worked, even without the references to the vast and sprawling Superman canon, for instance the a recapitulation of the space plane incident that featured in Joe Byrne’s The Man of Steel relaunch back in 1986. I just wonder how this film would play to people unversed in Superman: Would they enjoy it, or would it seem just another dense and incomprehensible myth?

There has been serious talk among Iraqi leaders to divide Baghdad into Shiite and Sunni zones in the east and the west to stop sectarian bloodshed and head off a bloody civil war across the country despite appearing in public committed to national unity under the coalition of Prime Minister Nuri Al-Maliki, Iraqi officials told Reuters Friday, July 21.

“Iraq as a political project is finished,” one senior government official said, speaking only on condition of anonymity.

“The parties have moved to Plan B,” he said, saying Sunni, ethnic Kurdish and majority Shiite blocs were looking at ways to divide power and resources and to solve the conundrum of Baghdad’s mixed population of seven million.

“There is serious talk of Baghdad being divided into east and west,” he said. “We are extremely worried.”

One highly placed source even spoke of busying himself on government projects, despite a sense of their futility, only as a way to fight his growing depression over his nation’s future.

Sectarian violence has mounted to claim perhaps 100 lives a day and tens of thousands flee their homes.

[. . .]

On the eve of the first meeting of a National Reconciliation Commission and before Maliki meets President George W. Bush in Washington next week, other senior politicians also said they were close to giving up on hopes of preserving the 80-year-old, multi-ethnic, religiously mixed state in its present form.

“The situation is terrifying and black,” said Rida Jawad Al -Takki, a senior member of parliament from Maliki’s dominant Shiite Alliance bloc, and one of the few officials from all the main factions willing to speak publicly on the issue.

“We have received information of a plan to divide Baghdad. The government is incapable of solving the situation,” he said.

A senior official from the once dominant Sunni minority concurred: “Everyone knows the situation is very bad,” he said. “I’m not optimistic.”

Some Western diplomats in Baghdad say there is little sign the new government is capable of halting a slide to civil war.

“Maliki and some others seem to be genuinely trying to make this work,” one said. “But it doesn’t look like they have real support. The factions are looking out for their own interests.”

Pundits told Reuters that broadly speaking Iraq could split in three: a Shiite south, Kurdish north and Sunni Arab west. But there could be fierce fighting between Arabs and Kurds for Mosul and for Kirkuk’s oil as well as urban war in Baghdad, resembling Beirut in the 1970s.

An observation: Why is it that global metropolises with names beginning with the letter “b”–Berlin, Beirut, now Baghdad–always get so thoroughly screwed over by foreign-accentuated divisions? I suppose that Indians should be pleased that their country’s most populous city is now called Mumbai.

Defence officials were still awaiting confirmation Thursday that a Canadian peacekeeper classified as missing and presumed dead was killed in fatal bombing of a UN observation post in Lebanon.

A spokeswoman for National Defence in Ottawa said there had been no further word on Major Paeta Derek Hess-von Kruedener early Thursday.

Major Hess-von Kruedener, who was serving with the United Nations Truce Supervision Organization, is believed to be one of four UN peacekeepers killed when a bomb hit their post in the town of Khiyam, near the eastern end of Lebanon’s border with Israel.

Ottawa has only said that Major Hess-von Kruedener is considered missing and presumed dead. Officials would not say Thursday how long it would take to conclude the investigation.

The incident — which also claimed the lives of UN observers from Finland, China and Austria — sparked rage around the globe, with Prime Minister Stephen Harper saying he wants explanations from both the UN and the Israeli government about the circumstances surrounding the “terrible tragedy.”

Mr. Harper, who spoke with Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert on Wednesday afternoon, has offered no condemnation of that government but has questioned why the UN post was still being manned despite the dangerous circumstances.

The Israeli Prime Minister has offered his country’s “regret” over what was called the “unintentional killing” of the UN observers.

Liberal Leader Bill Graham criticized Mr. Harper’s reaction as “completely unacceptable” arguing that Canada has been part of UN missions for decades.

The question of the degree of responsibility Israel bears for this is seems to be centered on the question of whether or not Hezbollah was, in fact, operating rocket launchers near the now-demolished UN base.

Britain is experiencing the ‘largest ever single wave of immigration’ in its history two years after ministers opened the door to millions of eastern European, leading academics have claimed.

Poland has produced ‘the largest ever single national group of entrants’ and Poles have now overtaken the Irish as the largest group of foreign workers in the UK, according to a study headed by a respected migration expert.

An estimated 600,000 eastern Europeans have flocked into the UK since 10 new states joined the EU in 1994, of whom around 300,000 are Polish – easily outnumbering 175,000 Irish workers, who were previously the largest group.

Britain was the only major EU economy to give the new citizens free access to its labour markets – along with Ireland and Sweden – while others such as Germany and France opted to keep them out.

Ministers claimed at the time 13,000 eastern Europeans would arrive each year, but the true figures have shown that prediction to be ludicrously wrong.

Professor John Salt, director of University College London’s Migration Research Unit and co-author of today’s report, claims the eastern European invasion is the largest wave of immigration Britain has ever seen.

His findings raise fresh questions about Labour’s claims to operate a ‘managed migration’ policy, and are likely to strengthen calls for firm limits on immigration from beyond the EU.

The huge influx has changed the face of the UK labour market especially in London and the south east, and in some areas has begun to effect public services.

Last month Slough Council in Berkshire warned that local schools were struggling to cope following the arrival of 10,000 Poles in the space of a few months.

The invading army of cheap labourers has been welcomed by employers in the building, catering and farming sectors – and the archetypal ‘Polish plumber’ is a popular figure in many areas.

However economists warn that the influx is hitting British workers by keeping low-skilled wages at rock bottom, and pushing up unemployment.

Professor Salt co-wrote today’s report with Professor Phil Rees of Leeds University’s School of Geography for the Economic and Social Research Council.

Their study shows the number of foreign workers in Britain rising sharply in recent years, topping one million in 1998 and reaching 1.5 million last year – one in every 25 workers.

Net immigration into the UK has more than trebled since Labour came to power, from 106,000 in 1997 to 342,000 in 2004.

Irish workers have traditionally been the largest group in the UK. In the eighteenth and nineteenth century huge numbers of Irish ‘navvies’ arrived to help build canals and railways.

But the Irish never matched the scale and speed of recent immigration from eastern Europe, and they have shrunk as a proportion of Britain’s foreign workforce from one in five 1995 to one in ten last year – by which time they only just outnumbered eastern Europeans on 11.2 per cent and were about to be overtaken.

One observation: If relatively well-off Poland is providing such a huge number of immigrants to the United Kingdom, the numbers of Romanians and Bulgarians who will make their way north and west in 2007-2008 when their countries join the European Union will be significant indeed. “Last one out, turn out the lights”? And, of course, there’s the European Union’s southeastern and eastern peripheries to take into account, along with Turkey and the Maghreb, and (via Spain and Portugal) South America, all regions significantly poorer than Poland, all with populations already associated with the European Union labour market and the Western cultural sphere.